Devil's Food
Sift 2 cups flour. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/2 cup butter. 1/2 cup milk. First Part 1 level teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 level teaspoon soda teaspoon salt Mix similar to Calumet Devil's Food. 1 cup dark brown sugar cup butter cup milk Yolks of 3 eggs Second Part Boil 1 cup dark brown sugar 2/3 cup grated chocolate 1/2 cup sweet milk and add to NOTE-Makes thin batter, but do not add more flour. first part while cold 1/2 cup sweet milk and add to first part while cold.
A two-part devil's food from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet: a creamed butter batter, plus a cooked chocolate and brown sugar mixture folded in afterward. Several quantities in this entry are incomplete, so treat it as a method to follow rather than a formula to weigh out.
- The hinge: cool the second part completelyThe boiled chocolate mixture must be cold before it goes into the creamed batter, as the text says. Warm, it will loosen the butter, start the soda reacting early, and begin to set the egg yolks.
- Missing amountsNo flour quantity is printed, and the butter, milk and salt lines have lost their fractions. Devil's food batters of this size generally run to about two cups of flour, but the original does not say; judge by the batter rather than guessing at the page.
- Grated chocolateIn this period this means a hard block of unsweetened baking chocolate scraped on a grater. Two-thirds of a cup grated is roughly 2 to 3 ounces of chopped unsweetened chocolate; cocoa powder is not a direct substitute here, since the recipe relies on the cocoa butter.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Do not substitute buttermilk; the soda in this recipe is already accounted for.
- Soda and baking powder togetherBoth appear because the natural (non-alkalized) chocolate of the period was acidic. The soda neutralizes some of that acid and deepens the crumb to the reddish brown that gave these cakes their reputation.
- OvenNo temperature is given. 350F suits this style of cake; two layers take about 25 to 30 minutes, a single deeper pan 35 to 45. Test with a skewer in the center.
- The thin batterThe note is worth heeding. The cooked sugar-and-chocolate portion carries a great deal of liquid, and added flour will give a dry, tight crumb rather than the intended soft one.
- YieldWith the flour missing, the yield can only be estimated: probably about two 8-inch layers or one 8-inch square pan, serving eight to ten.
Calumet Baking Powder was a Chicago brand, and booklets like this one existed to put its name into as many household recipes as possible; the instruction to "mix similar to Calumet Devil's Food" refers the reader to another recipe, though what that recipe was and where it appeared is not shown here. Devil's food itself is an American cake name that spread through printed recipes around the turn of the twentieth century, generally understood as the dark counterpart to the pale, egg-white angel food that preceded it. Its characteristic color came less from the quantity of chocolate than from chemistry: baking soda working on the acidic, unalkalized chocolate of the day turned the crumb a distinct mahogany red, a reaction that also stands behind the later red velvet cakes. Brown sugar, cheaper and more strongly flavored than refined white, was common in such cakes and adds to the darkness.